Packages of Kibana are provided for and tested against Linux, Darwin, and
Windows. Since Kibana runs on Node.js, we include the necessary Node.js
binaries for these platforms. Running Kibana against a separately maintained
version of Node.js is not supported.

Kibana should be configured to run against an Elasticsearch node of the same
version. This is the officially supported configuration.

Running different major version releases of Kibana and Elasticsearch (e.g.
Kibana 5.x and Elasticsearch 2.x) is not supported, nor is running a minor
version of Kibana that is newer than the version of Elasticsearch (e.g. Kibana
5.1 and Elasticsearch 5.0).

Running a minor version of Elasticsearch that is higher than Kibana will
generally work in order to faciliate an upgrade process where Elasticsearch
is upgraded first (e.g. Kibana 5.0 and Elasticsearch 5.1). In this
configuration, a warning will be logged on Kibana server startup, so it’s only
meant to be temporary until Kibana is upgraded to the same version as
Elasticsearch.

Running different patch version releases of Kibana and Elasticsearch (e.g.
Kibana 5.0.0 and Elasticsearch 5.0.1) is generally supported, though we
encourage users to run the same versions of Kibana and Elasticsearch down to
the patch version.